Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

By Lee Ann Lambdin and Jason Haley

Refining Your Process for Better Marketing ROI and Growth Planning Success

The first step in any planning or marketing endeavor for a healthcare organization is service area definition. Before demographics or market share can be run, an appropriate service area must be applied.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to define a service area. In fact, there are several ways to do it. Which one is best? The answer is, it depends.  Defining a service area is both art and science.   In our years of working with healthcare strategists, marketers, and planners , we’ve   found that most organizations define their service areas incorrectly, often defining   them larger than th ey should.  

 

 

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, analytics partner, healthcare service area, service area growth, data analyst, healthcare analyst

By Morgan Atkins

Within healthcare organizations, teams are now a fundamental unit of organization. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues at many companies.

With the emphasis on teamwork, it’s important for the practices of these teams to be thoughtfully considered. Particularly, the common and important team effort of brainstorming new ideas together. “Studies show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction.” The New York Times Magazine reports. Knowing that, we wanted to discuss how brainstorming can be an effective team experience.

Tags: strategic growth planning, strategic planning, growth planning, team, strategic growth plan, growth mindset, brainstorming

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, service area growth, data analyst, healthcare analyst, success story

By Lee Ann Lambdin, Taylor Smith, and Jackie DeGroat

Why It’s Critical for Measuring Progress, Driving Growth, and Meeting Goals

A Playbook for Independent Hospitals and Small Health Systems

Most marketing, strategic planning, and physician relations teams recognize the value of tracking the ROI of their outreach efforts, but it's challenging to do. This is especially true for independent hospitals and small health systems.

But for these smaller healthcare providers, it's especially important that they strategize and track success in tandem, because they don't have the money or bandwidth to duplicate efforts, nor the support of a corporate office or hospital support center.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, analytics partner, healthcare service area, service area growth, data analyst, healthcare analyst

Practical Tips for Maintaining a Growth Mindset in your Organization

By Morgan Atkins

Stratasan understands how paramount change is to progress. We strive to be trailblazers in the healthcare space, developing innovative tools and services that address our clients' growth goals. The best way we can effectively lead our clients and provide value is by innovative thinking that challenges the status quo. Our goal is to empower our customers with the strategies that will equip them to more effectively face a challenging and ever-evolving healthcare industry.

At the heart of innovation is the ability to reframe your perspective. Henry Ford once said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Often, the question itself limits what you think the possibilities are. If you have an open mind about the possibilities, you maximize your chances of building effective and unexpected solutions.

Tags: strategic growth planning, strategic planning, strategy, growth, growth planning, healthcare strategy, working smarter, healthcare growth, healthcare trends, leadership, change, healthcare leadership, development, core values, hospital growth

By Tony Camarata

Is your healthcare system failing to meet annual strategic goals due to a lack of organizational alignment? Studies show that the highest-performing healthcare organizations have a strategic plan that sets a clear direction for all functional teams. This plan succeeds or fails depending upon organization-wide understanding of the goals, tactics, and measurable outcomes needed to fulfill the strategic goals. Conversely, if your team is unable to establish alignment, your health system risks stagnation and year-over-year frustration about your inability to meet goals and expectations.  

Here’s a look at how to improve your hospital’s organizational alignment from top to bottom and why getting this right could be the key to meeting your annual strategic goals.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, strategic planners, strategic planning, data, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, alignment

By Lee Ann Lambdin

The Society of Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) annual conference is the biggest healthcare strategy conference nationwide. As stated on their website, it is “the premier conference for healthcare marketing, public relations and communications, and strategic planning professionals.” Headed into its 21st year, SHSMD Connections 2017 is taking place September 24 - 27 in Orlando, FL.

With an estimated 1,400+ healthcare marketing, public relations and communications, and strategic planning professionals on-site, 60 sessions to choose from, 8 targeted learning tracks, and more than 4 hours worth of keynote sessions, this conference can easily be an enriching experience for attendees, but it can also feel like you’re drinking from a firehose.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, conference, healthcare, healthcare conference, healthcare strategic growth, SHSMD, analytics partner, service area growth, shsmd17

By Taylor Smith

When you’ve invested significant time, capital, and resources into your organization’s growth and expansion, you want to ensure that your efforts are paying off.

You’ve walked through all the right steps for strategic growth planning: you conducted a business and operational analysis, developed a strategic plan, and your team has been executing against it. This planning process can be daunting for any team to manage, but especially so if you are a smaller hospital or one of the many hospital systems trying to maintain a growth mindset in the face of downsizing.

You have now arrived at step 8 of a successful strategic growth process: reviewing your plan’s execution to measure progress. The purpose of this review is to make sure your hard work is paying off and your goals are being achieved.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, strategic planners, strategic planning, data, healthcare, healthcare data, healthcare strategic growth, big data

By Lee Ann Lambdin

The Challenging Healthcare Analyst Landscape

As the sheer amount of data that healthcare organizations are collecting continues to grow at a rapid rate, the talent pool of individuals needed to analyze this information is having trouble keeping up. The high demand to fill this position has created an environment where health systems have no choice but to be very competitive with their offers.

Talented analysts are hard to find and, if you are lucky enough to have a great analyst, their skills are most likely needed all the way across the organization. Functioning with an overloaded analyst team or having directors learn the skills of a full-time analyst and taking responsibility to run the reports is not asustainable solution. 

Another solution is needed. 

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, analytics partner, data analyst, healthcare analyst

By Scott Burns

When our product team originally conceived Launch Pathway, the benefits stemming from the feature now known as Storyboards was at the forefront. As we have learned in our 6 years at Stratasan, often times product design is improved when starting with the end in mind. Our basic goals for Storyboards were to be able to save snapshots of data and visualizations, edit your story or presentation, and have each storyboard presentation automatically refresh with each new data release.

More specifically, the main model of Storyboards is an ordered collections of snapshots, each of which can exist in multiple storyboards at a time (referred to as a many-to-many relationship). As we worked through a variety of design and functionality ideas, we came to the point where we knew if the end user could not save a snapshot quickly and efficiently all other functions would be moot. A breakthrough occurred when our Product Captain, Morgan Atkins, suggested Pinterest as a place for inspiration for this functionality.

Tags: strategic growth planning, data visualization, Engineering, Pathway, product development, launch pathway, data presentation